Home­land Af­fairs Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der says the Po­lice Ser­vice must em­brace tech­nol­o­gy as a key tool to tack­le crime. He made the state­ment dur­ing yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at the Red House in Port-of-Spain.

Alexan­der, who re­cent­ly at­tend­ed the 49th Reg­u­lar Meet­ing of Cari­com Heads of Gov­ern­ment in Mon­tego Bay, Ja­maica, high­light­ed that Ja­maica’s po­lice have in­te­grat­ed tech­nol­o­gy in­to their op­er­a­tions, re­sult­ing in a re­duc­tion in se­ri­ous crimes.

He not­ed that T&T’s Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre is un­der-utilised and needs to be re­vi­talised.

“We need to in­cor­po­rate it ful­ly in­to the sys­tem,” Alexan­der said. “There must be col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the joint com­mand, the com­mand cen­tre, the po­lice com­mand cen­tre, and all com­mand cen­tres in the po­lice di­vi­sions. That’s how I see tech­nol­o­gy fit­ting in­to this. A man who does not see tech­nol­o­gy in polic­ing is not re­al­ly a po­lice of­fi­cer.”

Alexan­der stressed that his role is to equip the Po­lice Ser­vice, who in turn “con­trol the streets,” there­by re­duc­ing crime.

He al­so point­ed out that de­spite in­creas­es in both le­gal and il­le­gal mi­gra­tion, the sanc­tioned strength of the Po­lice Ser­vice has not changed.

“In or­der to get the im­pact we’re look­ing for, po­lice must be vis­i­ble. They must be able to chal­lenge per­sons,” he said. “We are al­so look­ing to reignite col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween mem­bers of the De­fence Force and the TTPS.”

While not com­mit­ting to a time­line, Alexan­der in­di­cat­ed that leg­is­la­tion ad­dress­ing home in­va­sions could be brought to Par­lia­ment as ear­ly as the next sit­ting. Re­fer­ring to a cam­paign promise to in­tro­duce stand-your-ground laws, he said cit­i­zens would soon be giv­en the tools to de­fend their homes.

Com­ment­ing on Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s re­cent an­nounce­ment about rais­ing the le­gal age for al­co­hol and mar­i­jua­na con­sump­tion, Alexan­der re­vealed that the Gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ing mak­ing it manda­to­ry for cit­i­zens to car­ry na­tion­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards at all times while in pub­lic.

Asked about na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty mat­ters that kept Per­sad-Bisses­sar from at­tend­ing the Cari­com sum­mit, Alexan­der de­clined to elab­o­rate, say­ing the is­sues re­main clas­si­fied.

Alexan­der al­so dis­closed that dis­cus­sions with his Ja­maican coun­ter­part fo­cused on pro­grammes that could help com­bat crime lo­cal­ly, al­though he did not pro­vide specifics. He crit­i­cised the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion for lack­ing the vi­sion to im­ple­ment such ini­tia­tives.

He added that the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to re­vive the Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps (CCC) pro­gramme, which is cur­rent­ly on pause, but said fur­ther de­tails would be shared by De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge.